Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery Vs Hashcat (Comparisons)
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Hashcat is a great, free tool competing head to head Both tools can use distributed networks to speed up with the tools we make. We charge several hundred the attacks, yet Hashcat needs a third-party tool for dollars for what, in the end, can be done with a free that. tool. What are the reasons for our customers to Both are thoroughly optimized to offer the highest choose ElcomSoft products instead of Hashcat, and performance on hundreds of file formats. On paper, is the expense justified? We did our best to compare the two tools have so many similarities they may the two tools to help you make the informed look alike. The usage experience in typical use cases, decision. however, could not be more different. Both Hashcat and Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery are tools for breaking passwords. Both tools can perform hardware-accelerated brute- We did our best to compare the two tools to force attacks using conventional video cards, and help you make the informed decision. both tools can do dictionary and smart attacks. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery Hashcat Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is a Windows only Hashcat is a cross-platform tool supporting all major versions of product. You need Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or Windows 10 to run both the Windows, macOS, and many Linux distributions. However, you’ll server and each of the clients. If you are using distributed attacks, be hard-pressed to find one single platform on which all of the each of the computers comprising the distributed network must Hashcat features work. From time to time, you’ll need Hashcat to run Windows. use several host operating systems to perform its duties. As an In addition to Windows, you need proper drivers. Elcomsoft example, you’ll need a Mac to extract encryption metadata from Distributed Password Recovery is comfortable with officially FileVault disks. released versions of NVIDIA drivers; we’ve seen no nasty surprises In addition to the host OS, you’ll also need the following to utilize with either Studio or Gaming drivers as long as they come with some or all Hashcat features. CUDA. AMD drivers are a bit sketchier, so we have to test major releases for compatibility. If you’re using a different GPU, the • git (optional but recommended) correct OpenCL driver must be installed in order for the hardware • Perl acceleration to work. • Python • C/C++ compiler, correctly configured and equipped with the required libraries. Some hash extraction utilities are available exclusively in source code with no precompiled binaries. HARDWARE ACCELERATION Both tools advertise hardware acceleration to speed up brute-force attacks. The devil is in the detail. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery Hashcat Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery offers GPU acceleration Hashcat is decidedly GPU only. The tool requires an AMD or NVIDIA on NVIDIA video cards, while some formats can utilize AMD video card to work, and you’ll need a compatible version of the hardware. Our tool can also utilize OpenCL, the open standard graphic driver. Where Hashcat requires the use of the OpenCL for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. Thanks runtime to interface with compatible CPUs (which we struggled to to OpenCL support, Distributed Password Recovery can utilize enable), Distributed Password Recovery addresses the CPU cores the GPU units found in many Intel processors, which can deliver directly, utilizes the native CUDA for interfacing with NVIDIA boards, several times the typical performance of CPU cores. Should GPU and uses OpenCL for everything else. acceleration be unavailable on a given system or for a given format, the tool transparently falls back to CPU-only implementation. SUPPORTED FORMATS Even the best password recovery tool is worth nothing if it does not • PGP secret key rings (.SKR) • macOS keychain password (GPU support that one encrypted data format you urgently need to break. (passphrase recovery) (GPU accelerated) On paper, Hashcat supports a larger number of formats compared accelerated) • BlackBerry backups (.IPD, .BBB) • PGP disks with conventional (password recovery) (GPU to our tool. While both Hashcat and Elcomsoft Distributed Password encryption (.PGD) (password accelerated) Recovery advertise hundreds of supported formats and generally recovery) (GPU accelerated) • FileMaker tick all the basics, our tool covers a few things that Hashcat does not. • PGP self-decrypting archives (.EXE) • Apple Disk Image (.DMG) passwords These include: (password recovery) • DashLane password manager • PGP whole disk encryption (password • Tally ERP 9 Vault passwords • Office 97/2003 (key search) • Hangul/Hancom Office (HanWord, HanCell) recovery) (GPU accelerated) • PDF with 40 bit encryption (key search) • PGP ZIP archives (.PGP) (password • Intuit Quicken • Apple iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) recovery) SETTING UP AND INITIAL CONFIGURATION Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery Hashcat The greater differences are experienced when setting up and Hashcat offers a typical Linux experience even if you are using it in configuring the tools for the first time. When installed on a single Windows. All goes well if you already have the compatible GPU with computer, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is essentially compatible drivers. Should something go wrong, and you may need a plug-and-play endeavor: you download the installation file, to spend extra time troubleshooting. This, for example, is what we’ve double-click to install, then launch the product from the Windows seen when trying to benchmark Hashcat on an Intel CPU in a Windows Start menu. That’s pretty much it; the tool automatically launches VM: the required components (the client, server, and interactive management console) and detects the available acceleration resources. By the time you see the main window, the tool is ready to run your first attack. Apparently, an OpenCL runtime is required to run attacks on Intel CPUs. Obtaining OpenCL runtime for Intel Core was borderline amazing. The runtime is only available to developers with Intel To sum it up, you need a supported developer accounts. Registering the account and waiting for its OpenCL device to use Hashcat. NVIDIA approval took a day; however, we were still unable to run Hashcat on that computer even with the OpenCL runtime installed. boards are supported; you’ll need some To its credit, Hashcat would run normally in Windows once we luck for AMD or Intel. If you use Ubuntu, installed a compatible NVIDIA board. We could also launch Hashcat in you’ll require an NVIDIA board. Elcomsoft Linux using the same video card. This time the quest was less puzzling; Distributed Password Recovery, on the all that we needed to do was using the particular version of Ubuntu, carefully uninstalling the pre-installed NVIDIA drivers (a wrong move other hand, just… works. bricks the system), adding the recommended drivers repository and installing the recommended driver from that repository. Piece of cake if you use NVIDIA. We failed the quest when we tried using an AMD card though. WORKFLOW: LAUNCHING THE ATTACK We have already noted that Hashcat is a command-line tool, while Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is based on the GUI. You’d naturally expect some differences in the workflow, but there’s more to that than meets the eye. The two tools are very different from the get-go. Hashcat Hashcat only attacks hashes; hence the name. You cannot just you name the files with hash data properly, you may get lost in point Hashcat to a ZIP file or a Word document. Instead, you must which hash belongs to which file. first run a separate third-party script to extract the hash from There is a positive side to hash-only recovery. You can keep the the file you’re about to attack. These scripts are not delivered original files and their hashes on different computers or even in with Hashcat, so you’ll have to look for them and obtain them different networks. You can extract hashes in one lab and run separately. As an example, when attacking a Microsoft Office the attack in another, or even send the hashes to a specialized document, you must first process the original document with password recovery service without the risk of leaking any personal office2hashcat.py. or confidential information. As you can see, the script is a Python script, which means you’ll have to install Python with a number of modules. On some systems, the pip module installer is not always installed with Python, so you’ll have to obtain and install that (note that the Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery workflow is different for the different host operating systems). Once you install Python, run the script and extract the hash, you’ll What about Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery? When receive the hash string, e.g. originally released, we aimed for simplicity, allowing to simply open a file to launch the attack, end of story. Distributed office$*2010*100000*128*16*a1688e8975694550a7a61b5 Password Recovery is smart enough to analyze the file’s content, While “office$*2010” suggests that the hash belongs to a document automatically detecting the correct file format even if the file was saved in a certain Microsoft Office format, Hashcat won’t take it renamed or has no extension. for granted. When running the attack, you’ll have to additionally Since May 2020, we are optionally offering tighter control over specify the “-m 9500” parameter in the command line, which personal information with attacks on encryption metadata. If you identifies the hash as an Office 2010 file. Why “9500”? Because prefer, you can use the straightforward classic workflow, but you are RTFM. no longer limited to that. You can also run the included Elcomsoft Dealing exclusively with hashes has its pros and contras. The Hash Extractor tool to extract encryption metadata (a.k.a. hashes) obvious drawback is the added complexity.